Technical terms explained
Assembly - The machine language, the programming language that directly gives commands to processor. Used to make demos (and games) for the 1980s computers. Also PC demos were written with assembly until around 1996 groups started to switch to C. Usually regarded as more difficult than higher level languages. *BZ *DPMI - DOS Protected Mode Interface. Specification for an interface that facilitates running DOS programs in protected mode. Most DOS extenders provide a DPMI compatible interface. *DOS - Abbreviation for "MS-DOS" which was Microsoft's non-graphical operating system (strongly influenced by CP/M). It was used alongside Windows 3.X which was slow in running DOS programs but Windows 95 was meant to be used alone without separate MS-DOS. *DOS extender - A program enabling easy use of protected mode in software running under DOS. BIOS and DOS code for the most part is not compatible with protected mode and cannot address memory above 1MB or work with linear memory addresses. A DOS extender provides an interface (often DPMI compliant) that allows use of BIOS and operating system features from protected mode. *Exe-packer - Executable packer, a program that compresses executable files and prepends code to them that will automatically decompress and load the original program on startup. The resulting executable file can be run as normal but takes up less space on disk. Runtime memory requirements of the program do not decrease (in fact, they slightly increase). *Gouraud *OS/2 - IBM's graphical operating system for PCs in the 1990s which failed to compete against Windows though is often well regarded. *PCBoard - A software package from Clark Development Company for hosting BBS systems on PCs running DOS. Considered relatively high end at the time, licenses were somewhat expensive. Pirated versions became very popular among warez BBS SysOps. Features extensive scripting support via PPL/PPEs. *Planar screen mode - Planar (short for "bitplanar") is one method to store graphics to computer's memory. *Pmode - Abbreviation of protected mode, one of the operating modes of microprocessors in the Intel x86 family and compatibles. Introduced in the 80286 and dramatically improved in the 80386. In addition to providing memory protection features for operating system developers, it allows easy linear (non-segmented) access to the full memory space which is why it was also useful for demo and game programmers. Also the name of a DOS extender popular in the demo scene, developed by Thomas Pytel known in the scene as Tran/Renaissance. *PPE - PCBoard Programming Executable. A compiled form (bytecode?) of PPL scripts. *PPL - PCBoard Programming Language. A scripting language for writing PCBoard scripts. Can be compiled into PPEs using PPLC. *PPLC - PPL compiler, creates PPEs. *Rooting - Cracking into the computer system and getting hold of root user's rights *Turbo Assembler - A x86 assembler from Borland. *Turbo Pascal - A Pascal compiler package for DOS from Borland. Very popular in the nineties. *Unix - The family of operating systems originating from the late 1960s. Often used in universities, industry and network infrastructure and also used by many hackers outside of the demoscene but not a common platform for demoscene productions.